Putting Deadpool Into Practice: Premiere Pro Project Template and Presets
As the editorial consultant on Deadpool, Vashi Nedomansky spent 9 months crafting the post production workflow used for the edit and trained the post production team in both Adobe Premiere Pro CC and After Effects CC. Here he shares the Premiere Pro project template and presets so you, too, can put them to use. Find the original posts and tons of helpful resources on his blog: VashiVisuals.com
DEADPOOL PREMIERE PRO PROJECT TEMPLATE
Vashi: After I was hired as editorial consultant on Deadpool, one of the first things I did was create a custom 2-monitor Premiere Pro template for post production. This was a solid starting point for all the editors and assistants before they customized it further to their liking. I designed the workspace with The Pancake Timeline already active and a basic bin structure to keep the project organized right off the bat.
I also arranged the panels in tabbed groupings that made logical sense for our workflow, which allowed quick full screen maximization with the tilde (`) key.
There are limitless options when you set up a workspace. This custom template was the most efficient and nimble option for our specific needs.
DOWNLOAD: Vashi’s Deadpool Premiere Pro Template
DOWNLOAD: Free trial of Adobe Premiere Pro CC
Vashi: Very early into the cutting, lead editor Julian Clarke asked me if we could add camera shake to certain locked-off, static shots. This can be accomplished in Premiere Pro by manually animating the frame with keyframes or by using a 3rd party plug-in, but I wanted a real-time solution without using a plug-in. I reached out to Jarle Leirpoll, an amazingly talented editor who also creates free Premiere Pro presets utilizing the included effects built into the software. Jarle’s “Premiere Pro Presets Version 3” includes 98 free presets that cover both video and audio.
For Deadpool, Jarle created 7 custom handheld camera presets that could be applied directly onto clips and played back in real-time. Jarle shot footage with real cameras and mapped both the position and rotation of the handheld footage into his presets. It’s organic and real. The difference between this and computer generated data (like the wiggle expression that After Effects would create) may not look different viewing the keyframes, but there is an inherent honesty and palpable naturalness to ACTUAL human handheld movement comparatively.
The 7 presets are split into 2 groups with different functions. 3 presets can be used on footage with resolution that matches the sequence settings. These 3 presets will resize the footage to 104% so the edges of the frame will not show black as the footage is being moved around. The other 4 presets are for sequences where oversized footage is dropped into a smaller resolution timeline. This was the workflow for both Gone Girl and Deadpool where 6K / 5K / 4K / 3K footage was edited inside a 2K sequence. This extra padding of resolution allows the handheld camera presets to move the footage WITHOUT resizing the source footage. This is the great benefit of shooting at a resolution larger than your final output as both stabilization and reframing can be accomplished without losing any resolution.
JARLE’S DEADPOOL HANDHELD CAMERA from Vashi Nedomansky on Vimeo.
DOWNLOAD: Jarle’s Deadpool Handheld Camera Presets and use them on your projects for free. By the way, these presets work in all versions from Premiere Pro CS6 and later.
PUTTING DEADPOOL INTO PRACTICE
Now you have many of the same resources used to create the record-shattering Hollywood film. Thank you to Vashi Nedomansky and Jarle Leirpoll for making these available… and free! We’re excited to see the super powered works they inspire.
Learn more about the unique workflow used on Deadpool
Learn more about Adobe Creative Cloud pro video and audio tools
And don’t miss this panel with Vashi & Tim Miller from the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, “Editing Insights from Hail, Caesar! and Deadpool